AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the early 1980s, I departed the urban tarot scene for a couple of decades to study and practice privately in the country, and when I returned via the internet in 2011 a full-blown controversy was underway over masculine bias in the cards.

The online community was awash in hand-wringing, finger-pointing and self-righteous moaning about the male-dominated imagery even though the Major Arcana have their fair share of iconic female and androgynous figures. This led to a bumper crop of new decks with a uniformly feminine focus that in my opinion drove the pendulum too far in the opposite direction for the decks to be accepted by anyone other than the activists who clamored for their existence. (As I see it, 21^st Century demographic majorities are far too prone to retreat when confronted with “tail-wagging-the-dog” pressure from vocal minority groups that deserve to be heard but should neither demand nor expect special treatment.)

The metaphysics of the Western Mystery Tradition place male and female energy on an equal footing; both are necessary for a balanced perspective, so I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The deck itself is a product of its era and the patriarchal power structure that prevailed at the time, so it seems inevitable that the cards would partake largely of that same worldview. It’s something we should just acknowledge as historical fact and move on.

What its detractors fail (or refuse) to recognize, whether willfully or as a consequence of naivete, is that what we see on the cards is just a superficial projection. Unless we choose to particularize it as such, that figure with a sword does not represent a human being but an archetype of masculine or feminine potency that functions in either an active or passive manner according to its disposition and its degree of maturity.

I know what Jung said about the anima and the animus, but I think the esoteric outlook is less convoluted than the psychological viewpoint: a manifestation of energy that is active, positive and assertive is considered male and one that is passive, negative and receptive is designated female. One is no better than the other, nor – like an electrical current – can it exist without its counterpart of the opposite polarity. The paradigm is not about biological gender but rather symbolizes the binary dynamics that underlie all decisions regarding whether to act promptly or “wait-and-see.”

With an uncommon mixture of male and female members contributing to the model, the late 19^th Century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn pushed the dial toward the middle with its fixation on the tenets of Hermeticism. (See The Kybalion for more information.) The serious student and practitioner must delve beneath the surface to get at the philosophical root of the cards’ meaning. Taking everything at face value via free-association is not going to produce a reasoned impression, just a gloss of populist misapprehension.

Which brings me to the cards themselves. In the so-called “pip” decks with their 40 non-scenic numbered cards, only the 22 trump and 16 court cards need concern us here. The same is true for the Thoth deck and its semi-scenic “glorified pips” that contain loosely representational artwork but no human figures. Only the portrayal of narrative vignettes in the Minor Arcana of the Waite-Smith tarot will give us pause, but Smith seems to have been conscientious in making her human figures sufficiently androgynous in most cases to escape the dogma of binary pigeonholing.

With a little clever circumlocution, we can work our way around the need to use gender pronouns in any situation, or just ignore the whole dilemma and fall back on inserting “or” between our male and female pronouns like we always did in the past. As a professional writer and stickler for proper usage, I refuse to submit to the indiscriminate use of “they” or “them” as singular pronouns, so – no matter how awkward and dated it appears – I will almost invariably employ one or the other in my text, with the first option preferred.

The Major Arcana fall naturally into two subgroups that have been labeled “internal” – Trumps 0 through 9 – and “external” – Trumps 10 through 21. The “internal” trumps are of interest to me in this essay because they describe character traits that serve the purpose of my title. (It has also been noted that – assuming Strength is left in its traditional position and we revert to the TdM Lover – they are all fully clothed, an allusion to the idiomatic “camouflage” of personality.)

The Fool is neutral since it precedes any consideration of gender specificity. The male cards – the Magician, the Emperor (secular authority), the Hierophant (its spiritual twin) and the Chariot – are “patriarchal” while the Hermit corresponds to astrological Virgo and thus takes a step away from that inclusive designation. (The figure is not so much androgynous as asexual.) The female cards – the High Priestess, the Empress and Justice (as 8, not 11) – represent the “matriarchal” contingent, while the Lovers is both binary (the human figures) and androgynous (the Angel).

To complete the overview, the rest of the Major Arcana include four cards with a non-human primary figure (the Wheel of Fortune, the Tower, the Moon and the Sun) one hermaphroditic card (the Devil), three androgynous cards (Death, Temperance and Judgement with its presiding Angel). three female cards (Strength as 11, the Star and the World) and one male card with hints of androgyny (the Hanged Man). Only the female cards make a strong case for representing matriarchal prerogatives; the rest have more complex iconography.

The court cards are a “WYSIWYG” proposition: what you see is what you get – twelve male Kings, Knights and Pages and four female Queens, although I recently made a case for two female Pages (comparable to the Thoth Princesses) and two female Knights in the “Brienne of Tarth” vein (Game of Thrones fans will see the connection).

Among the Minor Arcana, esoteric number theory decrees that the “unitary” odd-numbered cards (except the Aces and Nines, which are special cases) are active and assertive, thus joining the “male” subset at least in spirit, while the even-numbered “binary” cards (except the Ten, which is a composite of odd and even) are passive and receptive, making them “female” in principle. This numerological architecture is explained in detail in French author Joseph Maxwell’s book The Tarot. From an elemental perspective, the suits of Wands (Fire) and Swords (Air) are masculine while the Cups (Water) and the Pentacles (Earth) are feminine.

In all cases, these distinctions are attempts to quantify the relative degree of motivation present in the cards, although the lines of demarcation have been blurred in recent times. Still, I believe the abstract concept of male and female energy continues to hold water as a philosophical benchmark even as the bastion of biological gender is under assault by revisionist thinking. It has far less to do with sexual orientation than with an active/urgent or passive/patient approach to circumstances.